69% of farmers say Brexit has damaged their business

A new survey conducted by Farmers Weekly reveals widespread dissatisfaction among farmers and ancillary industries with Brexit seven years after the 2016 referendum.

Asked about the state of their own businesses due to Brexit, 69% of the over 900 respondents said it had been either “fairly negative” or “very negative” – while 83% said the effects of leaving the EU had been worse than they expected.

Major moans came over increased input costs (mentioned by 23% of those who took the survey), loss of subsidies (22%), import/export issues (21%) and labour supply problems (16%).

And while 58% of farmers said paperwork and bureaucracy had become “a bit” or “much” worse since leaving the EU, that rose to a massive 90% for those working in the ancillary sectors, where red tape is an everyday problem.

Just over half (52%) of farmers said Britain should join the EU and 70% of thought we should at least rejoin the single European market, rising to 85% in the case of those working in the ancillary industries.

And in chilling news for Rishi Sunak, 65% of farmers said the way Brexit had been conducted made them less likely to vote Conservative at the next election, compared with only 5% who said it made them more likely to do so.The industry was deeply sceptical about the government’s free trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, with 31% saying they were “fairly bad” for British farming, and 48% saying they were “very bad”.

Farmers who admitted to voting for Brexit in 2016 were more positive, with only 36% saying that Brexit had a negative impact on their businesses. They pointed to better commodity prices and greater business freedom as reasons for their relatively more positive outlook.